What can you do if your child suffers from anxiety or panic attacks? Therapist Denise Bosque has some practical advice...
Stress and worry are a normal part of life, and can sometimes be helpful for awareness, decision making or motivation. Fear is also a natural survival mechanism, but should only be experienced when there is something potentially life-threatening. When the threat is over, the parasympathetic nervous system kicks in, ridding the body of cortisol, and the systems return back to normal.
Anxiety, however, has no useful purpose and shouldn’t have any place in the human psyche. Living in ‘What if …’ land makes us fearful, and if we are predisposed to anxiety our brain begins to construct horror stories about the unpleasant sensations we are feeling and what could happen.
This conditioned response gets wired into the brain over time and causes it to get stuck in a ‘fearful’ groove making us hyper-vigilant, on red alert all the time.
I mainly work with adults, often professionals, who given their workload sometimes develop chronic stress, which is often a precursor to anxiety.
Now, however, I see more and more children suffering from anxiety and panic attacks from as young as seven years old through to adolescents, as well as university students.
PRACTICAL TIPS TO HELP YOUR CHILD
Parents usually ask me: “Why my child?”, “Did we do something wrong?”, “What caused it and what’s triggering them?”
These are bad quality questions and will get you nowhere except into a state of anxiety. You are doing the best you can. When your child is feeling anxious or worried:
1. Ask “Why?”
2. Listen: don’t say “It’ll be all right”, “Never mind” or especially “Calm down!”
3. Keep it short: no ruminating, this is the worst thing for anxiety
4. Teenagers often won’t open up, let them know that all young people have problems and lots of them think it’s just them, or feel ashamed. This can lead to an array of problems, so reassure them that you are there for them and try to discover who else they might be able to talk to about their worries.
5. Encourage them to do breathing exercises:
• Take long, slow breaths in through the nose
• Fill the lower lungs then upper lungs, with shoulders staying down
• Hold their breath for a count of three.
• Exhale through the lips whilst letting the jaw and mouth relax.
• Think of words such as “Calm” or “Relax” on the out breath
6. Watch their habits:
• What they watch/listen to
• Check what food they eat/drink. Caffeine, sweet food, recreational drugs are all being fed into the nervous system and cause spikes in blood sugar. Often this is the reason why someone suffering from anxiety wakes up in the morning with a knotted stomach.
